Jonas Olofsson
speaker
49 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Jonas Olofsson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If they are unpleasant to begin with, we can get used to a lot of smells that we don't find acceptable at first.
Yeah, and that's also one of the basic functions of smell is that it alerts us to new smells. But once we have sort of understood what it is and we have attended to these smells, they fade into the background. And that's probably because... We don't really need to attend to them anymore. We know that they are not dangerous. You know, it's the change in the chemical environment.
That is what we need to be alerted to. So our noses get tired and our attention span, our attention moves away to other things very quickly when it comes to smells. So people smell.
Many people feel that a pleasant body odor is a very desirable characteristic. And in women especially, an attractive body odor is as important or even more important than good looks. So it certainly is a big factor when it comes to finding a partner and romantic attachment and such. Those people who lose their sense of smell, they often report that their love lives suffer.
So they don't feel as connected to their partner on an emotional level as they did before. And oftentimes they might not be aware that it's a sense of smell that kind of brought about this close emotional tie between them. So the sense of smell is very powerful in this regard. In surveys on U.S.
college students, for example, women tend to say that a good body odor is more preferable than good looks. For men, the looks are more important, but for women, the smell is more important.
Yeah, it is very individual. And I think it's also interesting to what you said that we don't really talk about it very often. It's really hard to communicate and talk about smells and try to put it into words what we are experiencing. So a lot of it...
kind of affects us in an in an unconscious way so part of my efforts is to kind of make people aware and to talk more about smells and to attend to smells and and i think that will kind of lead to a better understanding of who we are and why we do the things we do one of the things about the sense of smell that i
Yeah, many people have at least a few of those childhood memories that can be instantly triggered by a certain smell. And yeah, it's not really well known why this happens. But we know that the sense of smell is fully developed already when we are born. So we are born with a really keen sense of smell. And that makes us...
probably able to encode new memories related to smell before we are able to do the same with other senses. And that is maybe why the sense of smell can bring back these old memories. Other sensory events, they tend to bring back memory from the teenage years or young adulthood. For example, our favorite music is usually the music that we loved when we were teenagers.
But with smell, it goes earlier than that. So childhood memories are evoked by the smells.
Yeah, it is, unfortunately. So a lot of the people who have smell impairments, they have that because of wear and tear over our lives. So as I mentioned, these olfactory receptors are exposed in the nasal cavity. So they are exposed to all kinds of things, viruses, etc., that we breathe in and that can have harmful effects. And even if the
The biological system is very good at regeneration and recovering from these insults. It's rarely as good as it was when we were young. So it's a normal consequence of aging. And unfortunately,
unlike the sense of vision we don't have anything comparable to to eyeglasses to compensate for for these impairments so there is no technology yet for fully recovering or compensating for an impaired sense of smell is it true that women have a better sense of smell overall Not quite, actually. It's a notion that was present already in ancient times.
Aristotle wrote that women had a better sense of smell than men. But modern research hasn't really brought that out. So if we test men and women on really faint odors, men and women tend to perform similarly. So we can detect odors at the same concentration. But when we ask participants to remember the smells or to describe them with words, women tend to do better.
So they are more able to cognitively elaborate and encode the odors in memory relative to the men. So it's both yes and no. They are better in some ways, but the nose is as powerful for men as in women.
Yeah, so we know that being out in nature and smelling the natural smells of the forest or the ocean or those things can have a strong impact on our moods and have positive health benefits. But it doesn't really work in an automatic way. So we can't just...
you know pump certain smells into into the ventilation system at the workplace and then people will be more productive i think it has to do with the context in which the orders are presented and the the people who are perceiving them so there is no real shortcut i think to to boosting productivity and and i think a lot of the aromatherapy effects they are due to the fact that people
put themselves in a mindful state and they use odors that they like and that they believe have these potent effects on their moods. And so there is a type of placebo effect going on as well. And people can use that for their benefit. So I'm not a believer in using odors too much in the workplace. It might actually backfire.
If you have an unpleasant work environment, adding smells to it might make things worse, I think.
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